Do People Believe In God To Survive?

[The Man in Blak 0]

Apologies if this has already been posted, but the New York Times recently published a fascinating article detailing the development of religion within human cognition:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/magazine...417&ei=5070

 

You'll have to use Bugmenot to get in there, since it's NYT, and it's a very long article, but it's worth the time and the nuisance, if only because it actually frames the development of religion as an evolutionary adaptation for survival. Very long excerpt below:

 

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. Psychologists call these tools, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.

 

Agent detection evolved because assuming the presence of an agent — which is jargon for any creature with volitional, independent behavior — is more adaptive than assuming its absence. If you are a caveman on the savannah, you are better off presuming that the motion you detect out of the corner of your eye is an agent and something to run from, even if you are wrong. If it turns out to have been just the rustling of leaves, you are still alive; if what you took to be leaves rustling was really a hyena about to pounce, you are dead.

 

A classic experiment from the 1940s by the psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel suggested that imputing agency is so automatic that people may do it even for geometric shapes. For the experiment, subjects watched a film of triangles and circles moving around. When asked what they had been watching, the subjects used words like “chase†and “capture.†They did not just see the random movement of shapes on a screen; they saw pursuit, planning, escape.

 

So if there is motion just out of our line of sight, we presume it is caused by an agent, an animal or person with the ability to move independently. This usually operates in one direction only; lots of people mistake a rock for a bear, but almost no one mistakes a bear for a rock.

 

What does this mean for belief in the supernatural? It means our brains are primed for it, ready to presume the presence of agents even when such presence confounds logic. “The most central concepts in religions are related to agents,†Justin Barrett, a psychologist, wrote in his 2004 summary of the byproduct theory, “Why Would Anyone Believe in God?†Religious agents are often supernatural, he wrote, “people with superpowers, statues that can answer requests or disembodied minds that can act on us and the world.â€

 

A second mental module that primes us for religion is causal reasoning. The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random. “We automatically, and often unconsciously, look for an explanation of why things happen to us,†Barrett wrote, “and ‘stuff just happens’ is no explanation. Gods, by virtue of their strange physical properties and their mysterious superpowers, make fine candidates for causes of many of these unusual events.†The ancient Greeks believed thunder was the sound of Zeus’s thunderbolt. Similarly, a contemporary woman whose cancer treatment works despite 10-to-1 odds might look for a story to explain her survival. It fits better with her causal-reasoning tool for her recovery to be a miracle, or a reward for prayer, than for it to be just a lucky roll of the dice.

 

A third cognitive trick is a kind of social intuition known as theory of mind. It’s an odd phrase for something so automatic, since the word “theory†suggests formality and self-consciousness. Other terms have been used for the same concept, like intentional stance and social cognition. One good alternative is the term Atran uses: folkpsychology.

 

Folkpsychology, as Atran and his colleagues see it, is essential to getting along in the contemporary world, just as it has been since prehistoric times. It allows us to anticipate the actions of others and to lead others to believe what we want them to believe; it is at the heart of everything from marriage to office politics to poker. People without this trait, like those with severe autism, are impaired, unable to imagine themselves in other people’s heads.

 

The process begins with positing the existence of minds, our own and others’, that we cannot see or feel. This leaves us open, almost instinctively, to belief in the separation of the body (the visible) and the mind (the invisible). If you can posit minds in other people that you cannot verify empirically, suggests Paul Bloom, a psychologist and the author of “Descartes’ Baby,†published in 2004, it is a short step to positing minds that do not have to be anchored to a body. And from there, he said, it is another short step to positing an immaterial soul and a transcendent God.

 

The traditional psychological view has been that until about age 4, children think that minds are permeable and that everyone knows whatever the child himself knows. To a young child, everyone is infallible. All other people, especially Mother and Father, are thought to have the same sort of insight as an all-knowing God.

 

But at a certain point in development, this changes. (Some new research suggests this might occur as early as 15 months.) The “false-belief test†is a classic experiment that highlights the boundary. Children watch a puppet show with a simple plot: John comes onstage holding a marble, puts it in Box A and walks off. Mary comes onstage, opens Box A, takes out the marble, puts it in Box B and walks off. John comes back onstage. The children are asked, Where will John look for the marble?

 

Very young children, or autistic children of any age, say John will look in Box B, since they know that’s where the marble is. But older children give a more sophisticated answer. They know that John never saw Mary move the marble and that as far as he is concerned it is still where he put it, in Box A. Older children have developed a theory of mind; they understand that other people sometimes have false beliefs. Even though they know that the marble is in Box B, they respond that John will look for it in Box A.

 

The adaptive advantage of folkpsychology is obvious. According to Atran, our ancestors needed it to survive their harsh environment, since folkpsychology allowed them to “rapidly and economically†distinguish good guys from bad guys. But how did folkpsychology — an understanding of ordinary people’s ordinary minds — allow for a belief in supernatural, omniscient minds? And if the byproduct theorists are right and these beliefs were of little use in finding food or leaving more offspring, why did they persist?

[iggymcfly 0]

You'll have to use Bugmenot to get in there

 

???

 

I read the excerpt and would be interested to read the rest of the article, but I can't get past the login screen. I tried bugmenot in both the address and password fields, and that didn't work so I guess I don't know what you're talking about. Where can I get an ID/password to read this?

[Your Paragon of Virtue 0]

Just register, it's free.

[MarvinisaLunatic 0]

So what of Atheists...if believing in god was required to survive then youd think everyone by this point would believe in some god by now but thats not the case.

[Dobbs 3K 0]

I question the intent of the original poster here.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

Oh, so we have the first ever officially nonbelieving Congressman now.

[The Man in Blak 0]

You'll have to use Bugmenot to get in there

 

???

 

I read the excerpt and would be interested to read the rest of the article, but I can't get past the login screen. I tried bugmenot in both the address and password fields, and that didn't work so I guess I don't know what you're talking about. Where can I get an ID/password to read this?

 

Oh, sorry about that - I should have linked that text to the Bugmenot website, just in case people hadn't heard of it. It's a page where user/pass combinations are posted to gain access to restricted websites, such as the New York Times.

 

I question the intent of the original poster here.

 

Well, the intent was to post an article that had a different scientific take on religion and how it fits into the human consciousness. Most of the discussions that I have seen involving science vs. religion always focused around philosophical disputes, but this article actually examined the function of religion itself within cognition; I thought it was an interesting read, so I posted it here.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

J'accuse! Seriously, wtf, Dobbs?

[Spicy McHaggis 0]

Seems surprisingly fair. I'm glad there's a group that can start to show how there is a method for science & spirituality to be complementary instead of opposing ideas.